Spring plantings (and what the Council needs to grow)

Springtime, and things are started to pop up out of the ground, things like "For Sale" signs.

There are now three (at least) on River Mill Road, which translates into almost 10 percent of all the houses in the neighborhood being on the market. Is it coincidence that the "For Sale" signs have popped up following the forced sidewalkification program that the Oshkosh Common Council imposed on us last year?

Could be.

Doubt it.

(The house at the top of this post belongs to a certain former mayor, who is now retired and who may have many reasons for wanting to move.)

The sidewalks are clearly here to stay, even if some of the neighborhood residents (aka taxpayers) are just as clearly not. So there's no need to debate their merits.

What is left to debate is the performance of the Oshkosh Common Council. As I noted last August, the central task before the Council can be easily described:

What needs to happen is that the city has to find a way to enlarge its tax base. Plain and simple. Everything else is just a distraction.

It ain't sidewalks. It ain't smoking. It's taxing cottonwood trees (only kidding).

Granted--enlarging the tax base isn't a trivial task. If it were easy to do, it would have already been done.

But appointing an economic development commission or hiring a new city manager and offloading the task to someone else won't work either.

The Council was elected to provide the city with leadership. A first step is to define clearly the desired outcome, and the second step is to establish benchmarks and intermediate goals. The third step is to start working in that direction.

Here's a small example. Last week the Council agreed to let the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh use its name to raise some money for work at the "Oshkosh Sports Complex."

What didn't come up during the discussion, however, was the tax-exempt status of the property. Should it remain so? Does part of the university's current "payment in lieu of taxes" cover the stadium complex? Honestly, I don't know.

But it seems to me that if the Council really understood the importance of the one issue before it that will ultimately make all the difference in the world (growing the city's tax base), then it would have made sure that the question of getting some property tax revenue out of this project would have been front and center.

In case anyone misses the point, growth of the tax base is critical for two reasons. The most important one is that the city's tax base has been badly eroded (after accounting for inflation) by the loss of manufacturing. The result is more of a burden shifted to individuals. The second reason is that the only way for the city to provide the kinds of services that the community wants and needs is to continue to increase revenues, if for no other reason than to keep up with inflation.

Property tax revenues are a function of two things, the tax rate and the tax base. If you can boost the latter, you can cut the former.